Sunday, December 30, 2012

It was just a bit after midnight on March 18, 1990, and the city of Boston hadn’t even begun to recover from a raucous St. Patrick’s Day celebration, when two men dressed as police officers bound and gagged two guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They spent 81 minutes ripping paintings from their frames, then threw them into their rusty Datsun hatchback and drove away with thirteen pieces of art today worth over $500 million. The heist remains the largest art theft in history.

The cache included priceless masterpieces such as Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Manet’s Chez Tortoni and Vermeer’s The Concert. Despite thousands of hours of police work, a lapsed statute of limitations and a $5 million reward, none of the art has ever been recovered.

I was fascinated by the crime and began spinning “what ifs.” What if one of those priceless paintings wasn’t priceless at all? What if Rembrandt didn’t paint Storm of Galilee? What if some unknown artist did instead? Would the painting be any less beautiful? Would it no longer to be admired? Would it suddenly be worthless? What is it that gives an object or a person value anyway? These are the questions that form the premise of The Art Forger.

The New York Times estimates that 40% of all artwork put up for sale in any given year are forgeries. Theodore Rousseau, an art expert from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, once said, “We can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on museum walls.”

It didn’t seem possible. But a quick Google search, which I did immediately after reading Rousseau’s statement – and exactly what Claire Roth, the protagonist of The Art Forger, does in a similar situation – provided me with more forgery examples than I could ever have imagined.

There was a story about a dealer named Gianfranco Becchina who, in 1985, convinced the J. Paul Getty Museum to pay him almost ten million dollars for a forged Greek statue he claimed was from the sixth century BC. Before they did, the Getty hired antiquities experts, geologists, lawyers and authenticators who used every high-tech technique – from electron microprobe to mass spectrometry – to verify Becchina’s claim. Every expert was fooled, and the museum purchased the fake.

Then there was John Myatt, who pulled off what is considered the greatest art con of the twentieth century by painting and selling over two-hundred “undiscovered” works by well-known dead artists, all his own original creations. But the con isn’t the best part. It turns out that after a short stint in jail, Myatt established a successful business selling his forgeries as forgeries at between one-thousand and ten-thousand dollars a pop.

I was hooked and spent the next few weeks reading everything I could get my hands on about forgery. It seemed the perfect metaphor for my questions, but theoretical questions only drive the heart of the novel; it’s the plot twists and characterizations that make it a story worth telling. And something told me the key to this lay within the life of an art forger. I just needed to find him or her.

The day I discovered Han van Meegeren was the day I knew I had the makings of a novel. Van Meegeren was a frustrated Dutch painter who spent years formulating the chemical and technical processes needed to create the perfect forgery. His intention was to hoodwink the art dealers and critics who refused to recognize his own artistic genius. He became a great, if unacknowledged, success.

An unappreciated artist, struggling for recognition, using his ingenuity and talent while sacrificing his ethics to exact revenge along with money and fame. What more could a novelist ask?
Van Meegeren used toaster parts to create an oven to bake his canvases. He came up with chemical concoctions that dried the paint between layers so carbon dating couldn’t detect its freshness. He devised a method of scraping an old painting down to its lowermost layer, using the old sizing, canvas and stretchers as a base to make the forgery appear to be hundreds of years old. Though she is not exactly based on van Meegeren, Claire uses his techniques and shares many of his same personal problems.

As The Art Forger opens, Claire is a pariah in the art world because of a scandal – perhaps of her own making, but then again perhaps not – involving the provenance of a celebrated modern painting. She spends her days working for a legitimate company called Reproductions.com, for whom she creates copies of the great masters to be sold online. She spends her nights creating her own works, but no gallery or museum will consider them. Nothing she creates is deemed to be of any value. Then in walks the most prominent gallery owner in Boston, offering her everything she has ever desired – money, fame and revenge – for a small price…

There’s an old saying that goes: A strange man approaches a woman and asks, “If I give you five dollars will you have sex with me?” The woman is horrified. “How dare you ask me such a thing?” she cries. “I absolutely will not.” The man then asks, “How about for a million dollars?” and the woman hesitates.

We all have our price. There’s a point where sacrifices will be made and ethics thrown to the wind. It might be for money, it might be for fame, it might be for revenge. Or perhaps it’s something nobler: to give up your own life to save a child or some other greater good.

To me, though, magnanimous choices don’t make for an intriguing story. I prefer to explore the darker side of human nature. It’s a character’s unprincipled choices that make us wonder what we might do under similar circumstances, what we might be willing to compromise to get what we want most. And the answers aren’t usually pretty.

So I went back to my original question about authenticity, about how someone or something acquires value, and flipped it on its head. What if the tables were turned and Claire was taken into the fold, her paintings acclaimed? What if the critics were in awe, the collectors clamoring for these very same canvases that have hung, unsellable, in her studio? What if suddenly her work was being snapped up for six figures, and Claire was heralded as a major talent? Are the paintings any better than they were before? Is Claire a more gifted artist because art critics, the powers-that-be, have deemed her work to be fine art?

I used to teach a sociology course at Tufts University called “Deviant Behavior,” and there was one important idea I wanted my students to take away from the class: What is considered deviant is defined by a society for a particular situation at a particular moment in time. An executioner at a federal prison isn’t a murderer. Slavery was once legal in the United States.

So who’s to say what’s right or wrong? What valuable and what isn’t? It’s a fluid judgment, compounded by the fact that the human animal is a messy species. There are rarely purely good guys and purely bad guys. More often, there are just good people who do bad things and bad people who do good things – and most of the time it’s difficult to tell which is which. Claire is no different from any of us. The Art Forger may or may not answer my original questions, but it sure raises them.

***

B.A. Shapiro is the author of six novels (The Art Forger, The Safe Room, Blind Spot, See No Evil, Blameless and Shattered Echoes), four screenplays (Blind Spot, The Lost Coven, Borderline and Shattered Echoes) and the non-fiction book, The Big Squeeze.
In her previous career incarnations, she has directed research projects
for a residential substance abuse facility, worked as a systems
analyst/statistician, headed the Boston office of a software development
firm, and served as an adjunct professor teaching sociology at Tufts
University and creative writing at Northeastern University. She likes being
a novelist the best.

Friday, December 28, 2012

Planning on spending time in New York during the holidays? Don't mis this Killer New York Tour by Cleo Coyle.

Sightseeing is Murder: A Killer New York Tour by Cleo Coyle

Fans of crime stories know that New York means murder, whether you’re inside the grim, blighted city from the novels of Lawrence Block or chasing down the perps and skells of TV shows like The Naked City, NYPD Blue, and Law & Order.

At the theater, we’ve gotten cozy with the Big Apple’s criminal element in films like The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, and American Gangster. Theirs is a nasty, brutish world with a drug dealer on every corner, shootout at the neighborhood bank, and the corpse of a cheating husband, ex-wife, or conniving mistress cluttering up most luxury suites.

Reality check: These days, the NYPD will tell you that our fair city is one of the safest in the country. Then again, that’s a per capita view. With eight million inhabitants there’s still plenty of by-the-numbers crime, which means New York will clock up more homicides, burglaries, robberies and muggings than most urban areas in the USA.

Of course, every crime has a scene, some more interesting than others, so whether you live here or are planning to join one of the fifty million who come here annually, we invite you to visit a few of our favorites…

BRYANT PARK

Bryant Park Carousel. Phoeo: Jim Henderson

Back in the 1970s, this midtown green space was nicknamed Needle Park because it had been taken over by heroin addicts, smack dealers, prostitutes, and the homeless. As part of the revitalization of nearby Times Square, this park has been transformed into an urban oasis complete with London plane trees, a restored fountain, Wi-Fi, and a lovely hand-painted carousel just right for a not-so-merry-go-round of murder. It’s precisely where our amateur sleuth finds her first corpse in Holiday Buzz—our latest Coffeehouse Mystery.

ROCKEFELLER CENTER

Has a body ever been found under the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree? J D Robb came close with her own “holiday” mystery, Holiday in Death, when she executed a character on the adjacent ice rink. In Murder by Mocha, our tenth Coffeehouse Mystery, we introduced readers to the Loft and Garden at Rockefeller Center, an open space high above Fifth Avenue, with a spectacular view of the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral—“available for weddings, birthday parties, and…”( we can just hear Hitch saying…) “that special murder.”FAO SCHWARZ

Although Tiffany & Company is just down the block (and who doesn’t associate jewels with the holidays—or heists?) our criminal inspiration came from the most extravagant toy store in America. In the movie Big, actor Tom Hanks danced across the giant floor piano. In Holiday Buzz those keys get a workout again—from a forensics team looking for DNA evidence. Before the murder, we used the store as a staging area for lesser crimes, as well: an assault by a masher and an attack by a remote control toy car (neither of which is recommended for children twelve and under).

CENTRAL PARK

Muggings, robberies, and assorted nastiness are all associated with Central Park (not to mention Charles Bronson’s famous shootout in Death Wish). In A Brew to a Kill, we added our own crime scene to the list with a hit-and-run murder on one of the park’s winding, tree-lined roads—and, no, the hurtling delivery system for a vehicular homicide was not a horse and carriage.

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

Photo: Alice Alfonsi

Lady Liberty is a spectacular location for murder. In fact, filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock beat us to it by dropping a villain off the Statue’s torch in Saboteur. (We didn’t have that kind of budget.) In our first holiday mystery, Holiday Grind, we had to settle for tossing someone off the Staten Island Ferry into the waters beneath Lady Liberty.

FUTURE HOT SPOTS…

We hope you enjoyed our mini crime scene tour of the Big Apple. We actually have twelve books worth with a thirteenth set for publication later this year. If you take our complete tour, you’ll see that in the Coffeehouse Mysteries, location matters—and, like any dedicated developer, we’ll continue to search for hot new spots to make a killing.

Alice Alfonsi & Marc Cerasini, who write as Cleo Coyle

CLEO COYLE is the pen name for Alice Alfonsi and Marc Cerasini. When not haunting coffeehouses, hunting ghosts, or rescuing stray cats, Alice and Marc are New York Times bestselling media tie-in writers who have penned properties for NBC, Lucasfilm, Disney, Fox, Imagine, Marvel, and MGM. They live and work in New York City, where they also write the bestselling Coffeehouse Mysteries and Haunted Bookshop Mysteries for Penguin. To learn more, visit their website: http://www.coffeehousemysteries.com/about_coffeehouse_mystery_books.cfm

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

December 26 is Boxing Day. I've put together a very long list of mysteries that take place at Christmas, and I'm sure there are several that continue through Boxing Day, but here's a mystery that focuses specifically on Boxing Day: Nicholas Blake's Thou Shell of Death (1936). Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of Cecil Day Lewis, late British poet laureate.

Thou Shell of Death focuses on Fergus O'Brien, a WWI flying ace. Fergus receives four letters predicting that he will be murdered on Boxing Day. Despite this, or maybe because of this, he plans a party and invites all the suspects (there are several people who might want to do him in) plus private detective Nigel Strangeways. O'Brien does die, and it's up to Nigel Strangeways with the help of Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard to solve the crime. This is Blount's first appearance in the series. Thou Shell of Death is an oldie but goodie, especially if you like houseparty mysteries.

And, in case you're not familiar with Boxing Day, it's the day after Christmas, when "servants and tradesmen traditionally would receive gifts from their superiors." Today it's a national holiday in the U.K. and Ireland. As far as why it's called Boxing Day, there are several different theories:

A ‘Christmas Box’ in Britain is a name for a Christmas present.
Boxing
Day was a day off for servants and when they received a ‘Christmas Box’
from the master.
The servants would also go home to give ‘Christmas
Boxes’ to their families.
A box to collect money for the poor was placed in Churches on Christmas day then opened the next day.
Great sailing ships when setting sail would have a sealed box
containing money on board for good luck. If the voyage were a success the
box was given to a priest, opened at Christmas and the contents given
to the poor.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

You all know I have a softspot for Typewriters. I often choose typewriters as my theme at the Flea Market. I don't collect them (no space or I would), but I do take photos of them.. and occasionally post here on Mystery Fanfare. I also love Retro Ads, so here's the marriage of both... retro typewriter advertisements for the holidays!

The Typewriter: Perfect gift for Christmas from the 20s through the 70s. Happy Holidays!

Friday, December 21, 2012

Just learned that Ed Kaufman, the magic behind M is for Mystery and a huge supporter of everything and everyone in mystery, has passed away. Very sad. A Memorial Service is planned for early 2013. I'll post when the date is set.

Happy Solstice. I'm so glad the days will begin to lengthen from this day forth. I'm big on light. Of course, since I'm a list maker, I searched out Winter Solstice Mysteries. Any other mysteries set during the Winter Solstice?

Thursday, December 20, 2012

The end of the Christmas Crime Fiction list and none too soon. Only 5 more days 'til Christmas. Here is the final list of authors who set their mysteries during Christmas. Christmas Mysteries, Authors S-Z. Happy Holidays!

Here are the links that will complete this list:Be sure and check out Christmas Crime Authors A-D,Authors E-H, Authors I-N and Authors O-R.As always, let me know if I've forgotten an author and title. Have a great holiday!

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Eliot Pattison has just published the 7th in his Inspector Shan series, and I'm so pleased that he agreed to write an essay for Mystery Fanfare. I really enjoy his writing, and I'm looking forward to this new Inspector Shan novel, Mandarin Gate.

Eliot Pattison’s award-winning Inspector Shan books have been praised not only for their poignant characters and unorthodox plots but also for their stark, heart-wrenching depiction of life in modern Tibet. Translated into twenty languages, the books have been adapted to radio dramas and become popular on the black market in China. Featuring an exiled and disgraced Chinese investigator who makes a new life among Tibetan lamas after being released from prison, the books cast a long overdue light on an important but oft-neglected part of the world.

Described as "a writer of faraway mysteries," Eliot Pattison's travel and interests span a million miles of global trekking, visiting every continent but Antarctica. An international lawyer by training, he brings his social and cultural concerns to his fiction and has written several books and dozens of articles on legal and business topics, published on three continents. He is the author of the Edgar award-winning Inspector Shan Series, the Bone Rattler series, and Ashes of the Earth, the first novel in a new dystopian series. But his sentiments for Tibet and the Tibetan resistance run deep. His Inspector Shan books have been characterized as a new "campaign thriller" genre for the way they weave significant social and political themes into their plots. Translated into twenty languages, the books have been adapted to radio dramas and become popular on the black market in China. For more info visit: www.eliotpattison.com

ELIOT PATTISON:

Years ago when I tested the waters at publishers with my manuscript for the first Shan novel, The Skull Mantra, the typical reaction was “why would you want to set a mystery in such an unfamiliar place as Tibet?” Many rejected the idea out of hand, saying no one would read possibly read such a novel, especially one with heavy doses of esoteric Buddhism woven into the text. Others suggested moving my characters to Brooklyn or the Chinatown of some major American city. I resisted all the armtwisting to shift away from my Tibetan venue and I would venture to say that after an Edgar and now seven books in international translation those early critics somewhat underestimated the audience.

Even today, though, the most frequent question I get from readers is “Why Tibet?” so let me anticipate the point and explain a little more deeply. Tibet was not some random venue chosen for its dramatic landscape and exotic culture. After a million miles of travel around the planet I had begun to feel that modern Tibet had a vital, important message that was largely overlooked in the West. I was interested in writing a mystery, but I was also deeply interested in conveying that message to a broader audience—eventually I realized that writing a mystery set in Tibet was the way to achieve both goals.

What is that vital message that underlies Mandarin Gate and the other Shan books? The juggernaut of the global economy has diminished cultural identities, religion, and human engagement for all of us. Our world steadily becomes less personal, less spiritual, less contemplative—and in Tibet these effects have been magnified a thousandfold. Many of my Western characters are fleeing in some fashion from that juggernaut, but none are prepared for what they encounter at the roof of the world. There is no better example on the planet of how global economics and geopolitics can crush a traditional non-industrial society, or how a faceless police state saps the humanity out of humans.

The totalitarian government in Beijing may be directly responsible for the day-to-day destruction of Tibet but we all have to answer for it, for it has happened on our watch. So many of us bemoan what happened in another century to the original populations of the Americas without ever considering how the same—and in many ways a worse—process is occurring today in Tibet. The Tibetan people have been punished solely because a more technically advanced people wanted their land, wanted their resources, wanted to increase their leverage on the global stage. We allowed that to happen. We empowered Beijing. We are the cause. We are the effect. As an ancient Greek once said, when a good man is hurt, all who would be good suffer with him. We are all Tibetans. The damage to the Tibetan world is an injury to our entire world.

That is the broad stage on which I chose to write, but of course underlying this theme are also counterpoints of compassion and cruelty, spirituality and material greed. Tibet would be worthy as a setting for its people alone. There is a great joy and harmony among Tibetans that has very little to do with what we in the West tend to link to happiness. They are technologically poor but spiritually rich, intellectually sophisticated but materially impoverished. Year after year they stand up to unthinkable acts of repression. The adversity they face, and the heroes and saints it generates, merit much more attention on the world stage.

These are the people I have chosen to inhabit my books. Mandarin Gate thrusts these characters into the gears of the Chinese machine that is crushing their country, which inevitably takes them into the network of prisons and internment camps that have become the Chinese gulag. There is great suffering in and around Tibetan prisons but there is also great nobility. The heart of traditional Tibet may have been in temples and shrines but the essence of modern Tibet lies in its gulag.

MysteriousPress.com is bringing back Ken Bruen¹s The White Trilogy in print and electronic format. Below is a video of Ken Bruen on Irish Noir.

Ken Bruen has been called the father of Irish Crime for his fiction's candid reflection of the Irish spirit. Bleak yet humorous, his work is highly regarded around the world, from Galway to New York City.

In The White Trilogy, Bruen explores the dark, seedy streets of London through the eyes of two tough, aging cops on their search for their White Arrest--­every policeman¹s dream. The White Arrest is a high-profile success that makes up for all past failures. For Roberts and his brutal partner Brant, this means going up against a mysterious hitman in Taming the Alien, and a cunning kingpin in The McDead.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

According to the Albuqueque Journal, Anne Hillerman, the daughter of the late Tony Hillerman plans to continue her father's Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee series. Spider Woman's Daughter will be published in Fall 2013 (HarperCollins). Anne Hillerman has published several non-fiction books. This will be her first novel.

C. C. Benison is the pseudonym of Doug Whiteway. He has
worked as a writer and editor for newspapers and magazines, as a book
editor, and as a contributor to nonfiction books. He is the author of
four previous novels, including Death at Buckingham Palace that won the Arthur Ellis Best Novel Award.C.C. Benison's sixth and latest novel is Eleven Pipers Piping, the second in the series of crime novels
inspired by the verses of the well-known carol, The Twelve Days of
Christmas.

C.C. BENISON: The Twelve Days of Christmas

When I was a lad – many, many, oh, many years ago – in the days when Canada had but a single television channel, two items were staples of Christmas morning programming: the Queen’s Christmas message and a short film, On the Twelfth Day, featuring a young Edwardian man on a penny-farthing bicycle visiting his lady love at her snow-covered terraced London house and bringing her gifts, starting with a partridge in a pear tree. It’s significant that he starts with the partridge in a pear tree – not with twelve drummers drumming as I do in the Father Christmas mystery series – because each time he brings his true love another gift – six geese a’laying, say – he also (to conform to the repeating verses of the Christmas carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas”) brings another set of his earlier gifts. Thus, by the end of the film, the woman’s home is stuffed with 22 pipers piping, 30 lords a’leaping, 36 ladies dancing, 40 maids a’milking, an appalling number of birds, and not a few cattle, such that the only escape from this mad house is from the roof, by hot-air balloon, conveniently supplied by the young man, whose plan it likely was all along to secure his true love to himself.

Unlike Her Majesty and her Christmas message, On the Twelfth Day – designed by cartoonist Ronald Searle – disappeared from Christmas morning viewing by the Sixties (though it has since reappeared on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRijElQVlVk). But I never quite forgot its madcap energy. Any time the song was sung ever after, the images from the film would slip into my head.

Skip ahead several decades, and I am in a bookshop devoted to mystery novels, in Winnipeg, where I live, trawling with the shop owners through the computer, admiring all the clever concepts for mystery series, whether letters (A is for Alibi) or numbers (One for the Money) or kings (Bertie and the Seven Bodies) or queens (Death at Buckingham Palace). It is Christmas time. Snow is everywhere. Seasonal music pours from every shop speaker, including one that features gift giving on a grand scale. I am reminded of Ronald Searle’s film. Has anyone framed a mystery series around the carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, I ask, presuming the computer to immediately spit out a list?

No one had.

And so the holiday that inspired a carol that inspired a film inspired me, and the Father Christmas series was born. The protagonist is Tom Christmas, an Anglican priest living in small village in rural England. He’s a widower, a single father, a reluctant detective, and he suffers more than endorses the droll pairing of his profession and his surname. He – and the villagers, too – are seemingly oblivious to the strange pairing of the crimes in their community and a certain Christmas song. A young woman is found dead in a taiko drum in Twelve Drummers Drumming. A member of a Scottish pipe band dies mysteriously in Eleven Pipers Piping. And yet, for all this Christmasness, neither mystery is set at Christmas time. Twelve is set in May, Eleven in January. Ten Lords a’Leaping, scheduled for autumn 2013, is set in August. One day, one volume of the series will be set at Christmas, but I won’t say which one. This may disappoint some potential readers, those who are avid for crime novels set at Yuletide. But I agree with Jerry Herman who wrote a song for his musical Mame called “We Need A Little Christmas”. We need a little Christmas. Not a lot.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Crime for the Holidays. Next to Thanksgiving, this is a major time
for murder! Here's the first part of this very extensive Christmas Mystery list that I'll
post over the next week. This list has been updated since
2011, but I'm sure I've still managed to miss a few titles and authors.
Let me know, and I'd be glad to add them.